Bill Cassidy tries to unite Louisiana conservatives

With Maness in the race, Landrieu slipped to 48 percent while Cassidy slipped 16 points to 24 percent. Throw in Elbert Guillory, a Republican state senator from the northern part of the state who has hinted at running, and Cassidy slips to 20 percent while Landrieu is at 47 percent.

The more Republicans in the field, the more difficult it becomes from Cassidy to win outright or advance to a runoff on the first ballot and the easier it becomes for Landrieu to avoid one.

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Landrieu has raised twice as much as Cassidy in the third quarter of this year — she had $5.78 million on hand compared with Cassidy’s $3.4 million.

Cassidy has been trying to prove his conservative bona fides in the House — he was was one of about 80 members who signed onto a letter by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) that was a driving force in pushing House Republican leadership to defund Obamacare as part of the government funding fight.

He voted with the bulk of the Louisiana delegation against a bill that reopened government and avoided a federal debt default.

Cassidy ran for the state Senate in a 2006 special election as a Republican but before had been a Democrat. While serving in the state Senate, Cassidy authored legislation to create health care exchanges, similar to the ones created under President Barack Obama.

His proposal, which never even received a committee hearing, has been dubbed CassidyCare by his opponents.

In 1988, while living in California, Cassidy penned a letter to The State-Times, a now defunct afternoon newspaper in Baton Rouge. In the letter, Cassidy mocked anyone who would vote for George H.W. Bush for president and suggested Louisiana residents vote for Michael Dukakis. In a sarcastic tone, Cassidy “thanked” voters for supporting Bush because the Republican president would ultimately help California by increasing defense spending while Louisiana suffered economically during the oil bust because of falling prices.

“You see, when the federal government takes care of poor people, education, health care, roads and the elderly, you people get a lot of that money,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO from archives of the newspaper. “If you begin to realize that patriotism has nothing to do with any of this, tell yourself that there was nothing that the Republicans could have done about the fall in oil prices. Of course, I know better.”

He continued, “Please do me one favor, dear Louisianans. Never ask yourself if you’re better off now than you were eight years ago. If you do, you might wake up, you might vote for a change.”

Cassidy’s campaign pointed to his time working in the charity hospitals, the publicly run medical system that Louisiana established to treat the poor, as part of his departure from those views.

“I would tell the 1988 Bill Cassidy he’s wrong,” Cassidy said in a statement to POLITICO about the letter he penned in 1988. “I’m humble enough to admit this, unlike Mary Landrieu, who can’t admit her deciding vote for Obamacare was wrong for Louisiana or that she may have been false with Louisianans about whether she knew from the outset that they would not be able to keep their current insurance plans under Obamacare. I’ve seen too much government failure, waste and abuse since then to agree with the Bill Cassidy of 1988.”

One plus for Cassidy could be that most of the Louisiana congressional delegation is rallying behind him.

While Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) hasn’t officially endorsed him, key staffers from the senator’s past campaign and congressional office have signed on to help.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) has endorsed Cassidy, but even his role as chairman of the Republican Study Committee is unlikely to sway many conservatives.

“Ultimately, I think you’re seeing a lot of people coalescing around Bill Cassidy,” Scalise said. “Bill Cassidy has been working hard, raising money, gaining support and frankly, he’s been very close to her in all the polling even before he spent his first dollar laying out his competing vision.”